Landmark Invasion

When Planning Failed, Heroism Rescued D-day

May 29, 1994|By Ray Moseley, the Tribune's chief European correspondent.

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — Along the Normandy coast of occupied France, thousands of German troops sat inside concrete-and steel-hardened bunkers, looking out at the sea and waiting.

From the fall of France in 1940 until June 6, 1944, it had been a long wait.

The Germans had mined the beaches and lined them with steel obstructions designed to stop tanks and other heavy vehicles. "Rommel's asparagus," the Germans called them, in honor of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, their commander, who was in Munich on this day, helping his wife celebrate her birthday.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published June 1, 1994:Corrections and clarifications.In a story Sunday about D-Day, the name of Chateau Vouilly, site of the first American press camp in France after the 1944 invasion, was misspelled, and the reference to "Rommel's asparagus" should have identified them as tall poles erected by German forces in fields across Normandy to prevent Allied gliders from landing safely. The Tribune regrets the errors.

The Germans' long wait was over, even though they did not initially realize it, when hundreds of American paratroopers descended, not on the coast, but on the Cotentin peninsula, the westernmost part of Normandy, in the early hours of June 6. More troops came in aboard gliders.

Just before dawn, wave after wave of American and British bombers appeared over the beaches and began pounding German positions. Offshore, an armada of warships materialized and began firing their big guns.

As suddenly as it began, the bombardment ended, and through the smoke and the haze of an overcast morning, thousands of landing craft slid up to the beaches and began disgorging soldiers, tanks and weapons.

It was D-Day, and the greatest invasion in history was under way. It was not merely a turning point of World War II, but one of the critical events of the 20th Century.

Had it failed, Adolf Hitler's Germany undoubtedly would have been defeated eventually. But World War II would have lasted far longer than it did, and its outcome probably would have looked far different.

The German army was already being chewed to pieces on the eastern front by a Soviet war machine that was relentlessly grinding its way toward Berlin. Before D-Day, the Soviets had killed 2 million troops, the flower of the German army.

Had the Germans succeeded in driving the Normandy invaders back into the sea, Hitler would have been able to shift many of his 160 divisions in Western Europe to the eastern front. The Soviet offensive might then have been slowed, if not stopped.

The other possibility is that Soviet forces could have gone on to crush Nazi Germany unaided and rolled on to occupy much of Western Europe. The U.S. and Britain might then have faced another kind of war-to liberate Europe from communism.

If Normandy had failed, historians say, the Allies wouldn't have had enough landing craft and other equipment to mount another invasion attempt for at least a year.

At the time, the Allies exercised almost complete mastery of the air and sea. Most of the German Luftwaffe had been shot down, and the German navy sunk. These were important factors in the eventual allied victory. Lack of German aerial reconnaissance had enabled the allied buildup to the invasion to proceed in secrecy.

But the Germans had recently invented the jet plane, and the failure of the invasion would have given Hitler time to get a fleet of jet fighters into production. That could have radically altered the outlook in the air war.

The Germans also were racing the Americans to develop the atomic bomb. Given more time to do so, they might have wiped out London and other British cities.

The U.S. undoubtedly would have unleashed its own atomic bomb against Berlin, before using it against Japan.

That none of this happened was due above all to the superiority of Allied, and particularly American, resources.

Most recent historians, eschewing the myths that D-Day generated, agree that the German troops in Normandy, battle-hardened after five years of war, were the superior fighting force.

The outnumbered Germans not only fought more skillfully than the largely untested, mostly non-professional armies that were thrown against them, but for the most part they had better equipment.

The armor on the German Tiger and Panther tanks was much superior to the lighter American Shermans, and the Germans had more firepower. The Americans had chosen speed and mobility over other considerations in their tank design, and they paid a price for it.

Time after time, Shermans were destroyed before they could get close enough to use their shorter-range guns against German tanks. Or, if they did fire first, their shells sometimes bounced off German tank hulls.

German antitank weapons and grenades, too, were better than those available to the allies. But the sheer numbers of Allied forces, their control of the air and their unmatched ability to replace men and materiel eventually wore down the Germans and sent them in retreat toward their homeland.

Hitler's own mistakes in attempting to direct the battle from Berlin, often overruling his generals, also helped the Allied cause.